HARD KNOCK RADIO – A WORK IN PROGRESS
An interview with Weyland Southon
By Janet Costello Monday, January 10, 2000 (transcription January 12, 2000)
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JC: Tell me about your job at KPFA? What do you do?
WS: There are actually a lot of things I do at KPFA. What I specifically get paid for is co-directing the apprenticeship program with Amelia Gonzalez-Garcia. We were just hired, permanently hired anyway, this last week. This was our first week on the job. I had been the intern hire for a few months prior to that. I’ve been at KPFA for years and, actually, this is the first time I’ve been paid to do something. Everything else I’ve done, Seven Generations and other things, has pretty much been volunteer.
JC: Who actually hired you? Was it part of the program council?
WS: Actually, I don’t think anybody who was part of the program council was on the hiring committee except for Rosi Reyes and she is not somebody who was on the program committee prior to the lockout. So it was made up of Max Pringle, who is one of the producers of the Morning Show, and the rest of them were unpaid staff. Everybody was a former apprentice except for one person. I think there was just, like, 5 people on the panel.
JC: How do you relate to the staff, do you feel marginalized at all?
WS: You know, the pendulum swings. Sometimes I feel more marginalized than other times, but I think people of color are very marginalized at this radio station, in general.
JC: Do you feel respected at KPFA?
WS: It depends on who you talk to. Some people I feel -- that there is respect there, and others, I feel that, you know, that, they feel that this may be a better place without people like me here. Might be more professional, maybe -- more main stream or something.
JC: After the station was off the air for three weeks, Hard Knock appeared in the high profile 4-5 PM timeslot 5 days a week --. How did that happen?
WS: It happened mostly by accident, because the programming at KPFA is so entrenched -- that was the easiest thing to shake up, that 4 o’clock slot. It was a rebroadcast of an earlier program, [Democracy Now] which is a great program, one of the flagship programs of Pacifica. But, there was a real need that came out of the protesting, especially the protesting that was going on from the staff of color, a lot of the volunteers and unpaid staff, and also a lot of unsatisfied folks in the community that are a little bit on the younger side, that were not feeling that KPFA was that inclusive -- especially when listening to it. I’ve been trying to organize young people and young minds around a lot of these important issues. It’s important to have programming that is relevant to those kinds of ears. You know the information is valid and good and all of those things, but it needs to be available for everybody to understand.
JC: How is Hard Knock important in relation to Pacifica’s mission in bringing about understanding between youth, people of color, and your listening audience?
WS: I think it has the potential to be a great bridge builder between generations as well as political realities, or however you want to describe that. I also think it’s very important for Pacifica to undertake programming like this because it’s reaching out to an untapped audience. We’re totally in uncharted territory as far as where we are directing our energies in terms of producing that program, when we think of who’s listening. I mean, we’re trying not to totally ostracize diehard KPFA listeners, but at the same time we’re really trying to outreach to a listening audience that KPFA doesn’t have, that it needs if it wants to survive, you know, to the next millennium.
JC: How does Hard Knock fit in with the diversity-race issue that Mary Francis Berry is using to challenge KPFA.
WS: The Mary Francis Berry thing is tricky, because, although I don’t believe she is really about what she says, there’s nothing wrong with what she’s saying. It’s really hard to attack her argument because it has credibility. On the other hand, I know she’s playing a card and she’s not standing behind these words, but she has created an opportunity here where a lot of us who have been saying these things are finally getting some play from the greater staff.
JC: How do you expect Hard Knock to evolve over time? What’s your vision?
WS: Well, right now it’s nowhere near what the four folks that are really working on it [foresee]. I mean, we’ve sat down a lot and hashed out a lot of ideas that we really can’t implement without any resources, so right now what you’re hearing is a program that’s being, you know, we’re sort of holding on by our white knuckles, so to speak. And, it’s slapped together in a way that I don’t think any of us are really satisfied with, because we don’t have the time to put into it, although we recognize that we have to put [time in]. The reality of KPFA is, when you get some time you have to fight for it to keep it. So the reality for us now is just to hold this time slot down in hopes of getting those kinds of resources.
For me personally, what I see Hard Knock being is a place for the apprenticeship program to thrive on the air because there really is no outlet for people coming out of the program to actually get their feet wet their way. Some of the things that we’ve been talking about is rotating co-hosts and it really needs a lot of tightening up. But nothing can happen without resources. People don’t realize that Democracy Now has an upward of $250,000 a year budget.
You know, whenever something happens -- and there’s several producers on that program --
I mean with, with Hard Knock radio, it’s just us. So if we have, for instance -- and it’s happened more than a few times -- if we schedule some guests to be on, and suddenly they don’t -- it’s four o’clock and they're not in the building, we have to go ahead and start a show without anything. Whereas, if you have a team of producers around, you can -- I mean nobody who’s listening will ever know that those guests never showed up. There’s things that fall into place because you have producers and people around you that can take care of those kinds of emergencies. So there’s a lot of things that happen behind the scenes that you really need some paid people in order to make it a tight radio show. In the interim, we’re just trying to hold it down and keep the door open. But we foresee it being a lot more than what it is right now.
JC: What is your take on the makeup of your listening audience.
WS: I think that we have all the people that were listening to Jerry Brown, Democracy Now and Larry Bensky. We have, just by word of mouth, been getting a lot more diverse listeners. We actually have a lot of listeners that are in lockdown. We’ve been getting a lot mail from prisons -- the prisons that are within the listening area. It turns out that the quiet time is between four and five, or four to six, depending on where your at, so it’s a ritual for a lot of inmates to be listening to Hard Knock and Flashpoints during that time. One of the ideas we have [is] to have some programming specific to people that are locked in lockdown and their families. When we were in Houston for the Board meeting there’s a program out there where all they do is open up the lines knowing that prisoners are listening, and families and friends of prisoners are listening. The family and friends call into this radio show and leave messages over the air for their loved ones inside. And so, for the general listeners, it’s like eavesdropping on conversations. I heard it, and it was just such powerful radio. I think that we’ve got three or four prisons within the listening area--
JC: Those of us in North Bay for KPFA were remembering that the Folio used to go to prisoners.
WS: Yah -- they had that option to send it to a prisoner...but really the audience that we’re trying to reach we haven’t been able to do any kind of -- KPFA has a real visibility problem with outside the choir. That’s really where we want to put our energies and, there’s never been monies available for promotion. Young people respond to a certain kind of visual promotion that the four of us working on Hard Knock are very familiar with. It’s thinking outside of the box, and a lot of people here at KPFA have never thought outside of the box. So it’s been really hard, for instance, to get premiums during marathons that are less than $60.00. Right now there’s a big push -- like we were able to successfully get a shirt printed up that was cheap enough that they were willing to carry it for $25.00 on the last one, but it turns up that they’re not willing to do that again. This is a shirt that I arranged myself with friends who own a hip-hop clothing company. The shirts were printed up at like $1.75 a pop and they're having problems accepting it for $25.00! I don’t know what to say about those kinds of situations when you have people who are fighting new ideas to the point where it’s jeopardizing outreach to an audience that doesn’t have money. It’s a big problem.
JC: Do you feel there is a tension between staff, youth, people of color, and programming?
WS: I think there’s more fear than anything else. That was another one of the great things that came out of this whole crisis, that a lot of programmers saw each other for the first time. A lot of us don’t know each other and we don’t listen to each other’s shows, and that changed a little bit after the summer time.
JC: Has there actually been a full staff meeting since then?
WS: There possibly has been. I’m not remembering one that I’ve been to, but I’m sure that there has been one or two. But those are the kinds of things that was why we were able to be taken advantage of so easily -- was because we didn’t have any kind of unity. We don’t trust each other. And I would say that’s about it. I wouldn’t say there’s, that there is tension, but it’s -- yah, there is tension; I can’t get around that.
JC: Folio was wondering if you could send us a more detailed description of your daily program schedule?
WS: I can definitely try to -- that speaks a lot to lack of resources too. If we were able to know what we were going to do a week ahead of when we do it, we would be able to list it in the Chronicle. I would hope that folks realize that this is a work in progress. We actually agree with a lot of the criticisms that we get. It’s funny that we don’t get criticisms on our own personal voicemail for Hard Knock. It goes straight to the higher ups when they have something to complain about, but all our love comes through. I don’t know what to do. Like, do we need to record all the people that like us on our voicemail to share it with everybody else who are getting these other messages? Which are fine, but it really all speaks to a lack of resources. People insinuate that we’re not professional, that we’re not intelligent enough, that we need to speak better English, the program needs to be tighter, and why does it sound the way it’s, you know, certain things that happen with the sound -- some of it’s very venomous and ugly, and some of it is constructive. People are very territorial and protective of what they think of KPFA and when something new comes along they -- some people, don’t know how to handle the change. I’m sacrificing a lot of financial opportunities just to hold this down in hopes of it coming through in the future. Tsade (Neway), Davey (D) and Anita (Johnson) have other outside gigs that they’re able to hold on to, but I really made some sacrifices to hold on to this in hopes of it coming through, and people should appreciate those kinds of sacrifices people make.
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